Research In Motion today unveiled a new cloud-based social music sharing service called BBM Music, as companies begin to bet on entertainment delivered over the Internet that incorporates social networking features. BBM Music, a new BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) service for socially connected music fans, is a cloud-based service that enables social and viral music discovery by allowing users to build a community-based music library that is shared amongst their BBM Music friends. The size of the music library continues to grow as new friends join the community and each user can select music from a catalog with millions of songs from music companies - Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI.

"More than 45 million customers already love the social communication benefits delivered through BBM and we are thrilled to be extending the experience into a uniquely social and interactive music service," said Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO at Research In Motion. "We have partnered with leading music companies to provide a 'full track' music sharing and discovery experience that will provide users with quality music on demand and allow them to connect with friends on a whole new level."

Key features of BBM Music include:

- Music made social - BBM Music is a cloud-based, social music service that allows you to share and discover music with your friends, creating a continually evolving music library:

- Build a personal music profile with 50 of your favorite songs. You can refresh your profile by swapping out up to 25 songs each month.

- Invite your BBM friends to subscribe to BBM Music and to join your BBM Music Community.

- With each friend that is added to BBM Music, you grow your music collection since the songs from the profile of each BBM Music friend are available to you at any time.

- Up to 50 tracks from your personal profile are shared with your BBM Music Community, and each member of your community shares up to 50 songs from their profile with you.

- Enjoy a social community-based music experience - the more friends who join your community, the more songs you can listen to.

- Discover music that your BBM Music friends are listening to, and comment on your friends' songs and playlists. - You can create multiple playlists from music in your profile as well as all of your friends' profiles, and with one click you can shuffle the entire collection of music from your BBM Music Community. You can even see which friend contributed each song while it plays.

Within your BBM Music app, you also see a visual timeline that shows the recent updates of all users within your community. It gives you a chronological view of community updates, including who added new friends, which songs were added or removed, which playlists were created and what comments were made by your BBM Music friends.

BBM Music subscribers can listen to full tracks from their friends' profiles - not just previews. Music can be also be saved to smartphones for offline listening.

Omnifone, a cloud music service provider, is providing RIM with a back-end solution for the BBM Music service that provides content management, music hosting and reporting functions based on Omnifone's technology. As part of RIM's proprietary service, Omnifone's back-end solution helps facilitate the delivery of a full music catalog to BBM Music users and compensation reporting for copyright holders.

A closed beta trial of the BBM Music service is starting today in Canada, the United States and the UK. The BBM Music service is expected to be commercially available to customers later this year for a monthly subscription of $4.99 USD in Australia, Canada, Columbia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, the United Kingdom and the United States.

For more information about BBM Music, and to sign up to be notified of its availability in your country, visit www.blackberry.com/bbmmusic.